Steam for Linux

Most (all?) of these systems are a combination of Intel Sandybridge and NVidia GPUs. The Intel one is used by default. Using bumblebee, a special command can be used to launch the game through the NVidia GPU (optirun or primusrun[www.webupd8.org]), which generally yields better performance and compatibility (especially with primusrun) than Intel's internal.

Now, games running in Steam seem to never try to launch with bumblebee, even if Steam itself was launched with it. Which results in people having to enter commands in the terminal instead of being able to just select the game inside Steam.

So I was wondering if some integration with bumblebee could happen. Perhaps autodetect whether it is installed; suggest to install it; decide whether to use optirun or primusrun, and which games will benefit from using the NVidia GPU. I think it will save a lot of users who just want to play a lot of hassle.

For those who don't know about Primus (I didn't know until today!), see this[www.webupd8.org]. It really is a whole lot better than optirun.

I agree with this! While even if the games run and stuff okay with Steam being run on Optirun (and I have no way to tell if a game is using optirun, to be honest... Anyone know how?), the average new user won't know. It's more user friendly to do this and all that stuff.

I see where you're coming from and do agree, but we have no certainty of if or when NVidia will ever decide to do that. On the other hand we have bumblebee, which is available now. And it is fairly stable and performs decently (even better with primusrun).